Placing career resilience: Collaborative workspaces as situated resources for adaptation and adaptability

Abstract

Processes of creation and innovation become increasingly mobile and temporarily make use of collaborative (work)spaces for paid and unpaid work, tinkering, social experimentation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship. Diverse forms of collaborative workspaces (CWSs) proliferated in many cities worldwide in the past 15 years and manifested in a diversity of forms, such as e.g. fablabs, maker-, hacker-, or coworking spaces. Despite the diversity, these spaces share three distinctive features: openness for a diversified set of users, aspiration to promote creative processes, and potential to allow for societal experimentation. So far, empirical research either highlights their functions in safeguarding the deficiencies related to new work regimes or the affordances for fostering collaborative creativity and innovation. We propose career resilience as a concept to integrate both perspectives. We investigate CWSs as locally situated contexts enabling users to combine stabilising and transformative resources to advance their careers. The paper draws on more than 100 qualitative interviews with operators, managers, and users of CWSs in the metropolitan regions Amsterdam, Berlin, and Detroit. We inductively develop five different types of practices that address fundamental career related uncertainties to individual and collective measures to create career resilience. In CWSs, users seek company, focus, assets, guidance, and meaning. CWSs are thus spatial and organisational settings that complement multisited, mobile work practices and that illustrate the importance of permanent organisational and material places in increasingly volatile working environments.